Dell on-site repair

Bongedone

Does anybody have any experience of them ? Do they turn up ?

I have a service call booked today to replace the hard disk in my laptop under warranty. The call center said between 9 - 5:30 and that the engineer would call. I presumed he would call at 9am with an estimated time. Especially as it is New Years Eve and they will want an early finish.

aliEnRIK

I havnt, but most engineers would call within 30 mins of turning up. Not the start of the morning.

Bongedone

Excellent. No need to panic then.

I have ran the diagnostics so that all the errors are ready for them to see Will save them about two hours.

ukjoel

Hi - Plenty of experience!!!!!

On the positive side - they call ahead, they turn up when they say they will, they are very quick, and they know the machines fairly well.

On the negative side the problems are prediagnosed by guys in India at the end of a phone the day before who select the parts. This means that if they get it wrong it can mean a second or in my case 5th visit. It also means an average 20-30minute phone call every time you need to talk to them.

As your issue seems software related you should be fine.

Also worth noting that if problem persists ask for new PC. I did after 4th attempt at repair and am getting one with slightly better spec than mine as its 18 months old so dont think they do it anymore.

Cheers

Bongedone

Glad to hear they are reliable.

It is definitely a bad hard disk. I have the error reports from the scans. Nothing else wrong with it. I even reloaded Vista and have it working but as soon as it uses a bad block it blue screens, locks up or restarts.

I just hope the guy in India told him to bring a hard disk and that it is the correct size.

sunshine54

oh dear
i had several home visits, and they changed ram, motherboards etc in the vain hope of clearing my random blue screens. it crashed before they got to the end of the road
eventually after insisting on a refund i got a new laptop.
not interested in my error logs, just change a part and hope.

ukjoel

Sunshines experience is similar to what I went through.
Luckily I have several PC's in house so no big issue with downtime.

My issue was with a sudden switchoff as if power had been pulled.
1st visit was new motherboard.
2nd visit was new heatsink and fan (which to be fair I thought was the right call)
3rd visit was mb, heatsink and fan
4th visit was fan as previous one was dodgy as soon as it went in.
5th visit was another motherboard and new memory.

At no time did they do any diagnostics - just replaced the parts they were sent with and after 3rd visit i started ball rolling on replacement PC.

Be aware replacement PC's take 10 working days and they wont switch hard drives over or anything like that. Fairly simple to sort out yourself if you know how but otherwise frustrating as your computer is dead you cant back anything up so even though your hard drive works you will lose all the data.

Also concerns over data protection and confidentiallity.